June 22, 2019 - Former Admiral and U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) Announces Candidacy 

• Sestak announced via video. He attributed his relatively late entry to his need to be with his daughter as she battled a recurrence of brain cancer.  The late entry means Sestak will face very long odds in what is already a longshot candidacy.  A large field is already in place and there are just days to go until the first debate. 

A comparison can perhaps be drawn to other recent White House runs by military men.  Former Sen. Jim Webb gained little traction as a Democratic candidate in 2015.  In 2003-04, Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.) fared better.  Although he was a late entrant, announcing his candidacy in Sept. 2003 (>), Clark was able to build a credible campaign organization.  Sestak, who has butted heads with the Democratic establishment, appears to be more of a lone wolf.

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June 22, 2019 Video  16m07s


Hello.  Thank you for joining me as I explain why I am declaring my candidacy for President of the United States of America.

[Music] I’m Joe Sestak, and I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras … to Afghanistan and Iraq … and the emergence of China. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, I grew up in this global canvas of service in the United States Navy.

My commitment to service came from my parents. My father was a dreamer who emigrated from Czechoslovakia as a young boy with his parents. He served throughout World War II from landings against Nazi Germany to kamikaze attacks by imperialist Japan.  He continued his naval service as he raised eight children with my Mom, who also served her country for 30 years in education as a high school math teacher — because education is our real homeland defense.

I learned integrity’s values by my parents living them: service to country, to others … above self … with accountability, in answering for oneself.

It’s how the Navy prepared me for increasing responsibility and command at sea and ashore, sending me for a doctorate at Harvard University. I was sent to work for General Colin Powell then for President Clinton at the White House.

As the three star Admiral in charge of the Navy’s Warfare Requirements, my proposed controversial reduction in ship-levels from 375 to 260 challenged the long-held assumption that numbers were the best measure of military capability. I saw a future owned by whoever best harnessed cyberspace, at less cost – and still do.  However it proved unnerving to the military-industrial-congressional complex, an experience that would serve me later well in politics, when accountability for doing what's needed would again mean going against the gray norms.

On 9/11, I had walked out of the Pentagon when shortly after the plane dove into the building. I quickly came back and looked down at the burning scar the plane had made on the Pentagon and on our nation that fateful day. I worked that night in a makeshift Navy command center on the hill.  Again the world had changed and I was called and told to establish the Navy’s strategic anti-terrorism unit. It took me to Afghanistan for a very brief period as the war started, gathering with SEALs in broken down farm houses and assessing rules of engagement for our high tech air power in this very different war of terror on the ground.

Returning, I was given the highest honor our nation can bestow upon anyone: to lead our sons and daughters in harm's way, for me as Commander of an aircraft carrier battle group.  When we arrived in the Arabian Sea to begin our strikes against Afghanistan, my 10,000 sailors, SEALs and marines experienced whatI had seen whenever I had served my country. Waiting there for us to become part of our American battle group was an international armada. The Italian Minister of Defense said it well for why they all came, “Some may think," he said, "That we Italians are better lovers than warriors, but we are coming because America has been attacked, and we will be there for them.”

We had the world with us … united against evil … because in that distant sea was the realization that America’s greatest power is its power to convene, to bring the peoples and nations of the world together for a common cause that serves us all.

That is what America had been doing ever since the world’s greatest generation had returned home from having defeated the horrors of fascism and imperialism in the second of the world wars.

They swore it wouldn’t happen again. They kept their promise by building a liberal world order based upon the rules of individual and human rights, open and fair markets, fair and just governments. It was one that embraced the world's collective good.  Whether Stalinism or human rights atrocities, dire poverty or world recessions, we convened the world by the power of these ideals. 

And that is why America’s retreat from the world today is so dangerous and damaging to our American Dream.

First, if there is any doubt that this global concord and our leadership of it is the absolute prerequisite for our safety, health, security, economy, our way of life, it vanishes under the harsh reality that there is nothing we can do just by ourselves – absolutely nothing — to protect America from the most destructive threat to mankind. 

In just a decade we'll begin a slow implosion of our world into crisis.  That is when the worst seeds of irreversible consequences from climate change will have begun to be suffered.  Unless uprooted they will eventually grow into wars because of desperate drought and famine, violent seizing and hording of diminished global resources, economic shocks to poor and rich alike, and the bankruptcy of the idea that governments can actually provide for their people's general welfare as the relentless rise of global heat and oceans takes an uncontrollable toll on their citizens.

Meanwhile, China is knocking down the barriers to its emerging global order of Sinocentric institutions and authoritarian values.  It has a GDP poised to surpass ours in four years with a military that the U.S. military commander of the Pacific has said, China commands the Western Pacific with a growing global naval presence.  It is the first loss of command of the seas by the U.S. Navy anywhere since World War II.

institutions.So as America heads home, telling bruised allies left behind "it's a wrap," China is exploiting its unchecked freedom to impose its illiberal values of “might makes right" through its expanding  For instance, China now has a virtual monopoly in manufacturing the supply chains that make these companies' high tech products.  For example, from android phones to Chineses software sereptiously sent to China, Chinese corporations are now connecting two-thirds of the world's population to the transformational speed of the 5G network. This is arguably the greatest threat of all. China’s ownership will give it a police-state capability to surveil everything on the network, both for commercial and intelligence purposes.

It now is truly one world, where destruction by climate change; contraction of our way of life by China; and damage to our national security by corporations will happen no matter what we do, just by ourselves.

Today, we must have a President who knows how to serve us abroad – but also at home. Which is why I ran my first congressional campaign under the refrain, “I’m a former Navy Admiral, running on national security … that begins at home, in health security.”

This was due to the awful day when my wife, Susan, and I watched as Alex, our then-four year old daughter was wheeled out of surgery at Walter Reed Military Hospital with her saddened doctors beside her. We couldn’t get the brain cancer, they told us.  When asked, they gently replied “she has about three perhaps nine months.”

But our little warrior fought on.  The burning radiation, the ravages of high-dose chemotherapy and two more brain operations with the best medical specialists our nation could provide. With her courage, Alex beat that demon. I knew then that I needed to answer to you, the American people. Because you had kept your word by providing the military healthcare coverage that saved our daughter’s life.

As Alex's treatment neared its end and I had left the Navy, I thought of the day when she'd begun her chemotherapy.  Susan and I could not help but overhear in that small room the conversation of hospital counselors with the parents of the boy who was Alex's roommate.  He had just been diagnosed with cancer.  They were struggling to figure out how could he stay, because the family was without health coverage.  Susan and I knew too well the anguish they were feeling.  That helped show me that I needed to work for every family to have the health care coverage that we had had for Alex.

I changed from being an independent in the military to Democrat, returning home to Pennsylvania to run for Congress. It was a nearly 2 to 1 Republican District where I had been raised, bringing a sign my daughter had painted, “Joe Sestak is walking in your shoes.”

Honored to be the Republican district's second congressman since the Civil War, I was fortunate to be the highest-ranking military officer ever elected to the U.S. Congress when I entered it just as the Great Recession began. Our office was open seven days a week until 9 p.m. every night to deal with the devastation to the lives of our constituents.

The staff helped save from foreclosure over 800 homes of families who had lost jobs.  In all our congressional office handled four times the constituency cases of the average congressional office.  I also returned to the Treasury the pay increase that Congress had given itself during the economic meltdown.  As a result the House Majority Leader cited our first year efforts as the most productive of our freshman class, ending up passing 19 pieces of bi-partisan legislation during my first term.

But the constant refrain in the thousands of constituency cases we handled was: why isn’t a government of the people, more accountable to the people?

Washington, DC has become the restricted circle of entrenched political elite and corporate lobbyists who feel empowered to bypass the public good for their self-interest.

The president is not the problem; he is the symptom of the problem people see with a system that is not fair and accountable to the people for far too long.

Take Iraq.  Politicians of both parties who supported that decision did not understand due to the complexities of the world or the limitations of military power.  And no one, not one political leader or any other, has ever answered for themselves to be accountable for the carnage of either that great recession or that tragic war.

It is this unaccountable leadership that is responsible for the lack of trust in America today, that undermines our sense of national unity, of who we are and what we stand for.

For the leader who is trusted by the people because he's willing to be accountable to them — above self, above party, above any special interest — no matter the cost to him.  Our epic challenge is to regain the trust of Americans, all Americans by a presdent who the people know will remain accountable to them even when they disagree.

We have no choice.  For we cannot meet the defining challenges of our time without a united America.  Our nation, about anything else, yearns for someone accountable only to the American people, no matter the consequences to himself and that is why I originally ran for the U.S. Senate, despite the opposition of our party’s Washington establishment. I disagreed that a Senator should be our party’s nominee who had humiliated Anita Hill, allowed to do so by members of our party as she testified about her sexual harassment by now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. There was no pleasure in opposing every member of my party’s elite to defeat Senator Arlen Spector who defected his Republican party only to avoid defeat in its primary, but there would have been less in not standing up to demand accountability for the thirty years of his damaging votes as a Senator, including against Ms. Hill.

Come aboard an aircraft carrier with me for a moment and see what the American people most want and most need, where 5,000 American sailors live, work and go to war together. At an average age of 19 ½, they run the ship’s nuclear reactor, fix a pilot’s plane before he or she takes off in it – without the pilot even questioning them. It’s just a professional salute before the plane is catapulted into the dark of the night, which [inaud./audio glitch] for the ride of your life.  Disneyland has nothing to...for that ride.

But sometimes, the Air Boss calls out to stop the launch, to change out planes, something is wrong, and you need another aircraft over Afghanistan.  Then you see what America most wants today.

A young sailor goes out on that dark, windy carrier deck and goes underneath the belly of that plane where the pilot cannot see and unhooks the plane from the catapult.  No pilot will turn off his or her engine until they know that they have first been unhooked from that powerful sling because if a mistake were to be made after the plane's engines were turned off and the plane were still attached to that catapult as it was suddenly slung forward it would be the last ride of the pilot's life.  Since a young sailor knows that the pilot cannot see him unhooking the plane, the sailor then walks in front of the aircraft and looks up at the pilot and gives a very simple signal that says it all: "Go ahead.  You can trust me, because I’m willing to be accountable by standing right here until you turn off your engines, open up your plane's canopy and are safely on deck. And if I made a mistake, and you start heading overboard to your death while still in the plane, you're going to go right through me and I am going to go with you to my own.”

No one in America believes that anyone in Washington DC is willing to stand in front of that plane, accountable to them. As your President, I want to – for all Americans, so we can accomplish our agenda together, before the hour is too late.

And while my announcement may be later than others for the honor of seeking the Presidency, the decision to delay was so I would be there with our daughter after her brain cancer had returned as she courageously refaced that dreadful disease.  Throughout this past year, Alex again showed she is stronger than me, heroically beating the single digit odds once more, drawing on the fortitude of her Mom.

Americans know that we have more in common than we do differences. I know. I served with all of you in the global canvas of our Navy and served all of you as a Congressman. And now, as President, I will need all of you to help answer the call for America’s leadership to restore a just world order so it serves us by raising our collective good, here at home – done by my gaining your trust that I will always remain accountable to you alone.

Thank you!
We must convene the world for two primary objectives: Putting a brake on climate change and putting an end to an illiberal world order’s injustices.

The hour has become late to restore U.S. leadership to this liberal world order, but Iraq is our lesson to remember. Democrats and Republicans alike who cast their votes for the tragic misadventure in Iraq showed little understanding that while militaries can stop a problem, they can never fix a problem.

Our country desperately needs a President with a depth of global experience and an understanding of all the elements of our nation’s power, from our economy and our diplomacy to the power of our ideals and our military, including its limitations. So that, when faced with the decision on whether to use our military, our Commander-in-Chief will know how it will end before deciding if it is wise to begin.